October 7, 1999
12:00 PM (EDT)

News Release Number: STScI-1999-35

Hubble Heritage Project's First Anniversary

October 7, 1999: To mark the first anniversary of the Hubble Heritage Project, we present four Hubble telescope images of nebulae surrounding stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Two of these visible-light pictures show interstellar gas and dust around young stars at the beginning of their lives, and two more show gas ejected from old stars that are nearing the end of theirs. Remarkably, in spite of the completely different evolutionary stages, the nebulae have more striking features in common, including evidence of diametrically opposed gas ejections from both the young and old stars.